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This complexity of continuity and change is reflected in the world outside of academic social policy. The context of neoliberalism and austerity politics, racialization and dehumanization of border practices, care crises and ecological disasters – including the 2020 pandemic – feels overwhelming. Yet recent decades have seen not only the impact of global social movements that I mentioned earlier but also a resurgence of local feminist and anti-racist activism, eco-activism and anti-austerity campaigns – the last often spearheaded by disability organizations. Alongside these, innovative democratically run decentralized initiatives have been established in communities ‘discarded by the market and disregarded by the state’, where people ‘are already doing economics differently’ (Chakrabortty 2018). These include new cooperative schemes, new unions, new forms of municipalism and community development, healthy cities, social enterprises, new models of co-production and service delivery, and new democratic modes such as citizens’ assemblies (Featherstone et al. 2020; Miller 2020). New global networks of ‘Fearless Cities’ are transforming cities through street-level democracy and feminist and anti-racist, pro-migrant solidarities (Barcelona en comú et al. 2019). Many experiments exist in generating zero growth and ecologically sustainable local economies in transition towns (Red Pepper 2020). Transnational movements have developed for indigenous peoples’ and migrants’ rights, against militarism, and for territorial justice, along with the remarkable international mobilization of school students’ strikes against climate change started in 2018. International campaigns for LGBTQI+ rights have achieved significant cultural recognition, albeit uneven and contested, that would not have seemed possible at the turn of the century (Weeks 2007; Abrahams 2019). In addition, in many areas, the Covid-19 pandemic revealed street-level actions of generosity, kindness, mutual aid and care (Solnit 2020).

While this resurgence signifies challenge and change, there is also a sense of intensified continuities – the ‘unfinished business’ of everyday and institutional racism, sexism, ableism and ageism finding consequential logics in different forms of inequalities, insecurities and child poverty, all of which were magnified by the pandemic crisis. The increased precarity of working conditions, combined with austerity cutbacks in services and benefits, disproportionately affects the wellbeing of black and minority ethnic women (WBG and Runnymede Trust 2017). A systematic account of ethnicity, race, discrimination and racism published in 2020 found that these were entrenched for all minority groups in all areas of society – education, employment, housing, health, criminal justice and policing, as well as politics, the arts, media and sport (Byrne et al. 2020). Even the Conservative government’s Racial Disparity Unit worried in 2018 that ‘there is still a way to go before we have a country that works for everyone regardless of their ethnicity’ (Cabinet Office 2018: 1).

These forms of inequality were reproduced in the disproportionate effects of the Covid-19 pandemic: in the UK, BAME men and women were over four times more likely to die than their white counterparts (ONS 2020a). The high numbers of deaths of care-home residents (ONS 2020b) underlined the low value given to both residents and workers in care homes and the creaking health and social care infrastructure. Disability organizations have been at the forefront of campaigns around welfare benefit cuts; at the same time they have also been the target of a big increase in hate crimes (Burch 2018). Transgender activists have made headway in challenging transphobia, yet trans and gender-diverse as well as LGBTQ people face significantly greater risk of unemployment, hate crime and homelessness, risks which are heightened for BAME trans groups (Bachmann and Gooch 2017; Hines 2013; Abrahams 2019).

New critical thinking that has been inspired by and inspires such activism also involves a double movement of continuity and change: introducing new ideas as well as interrogating and resituating ‘old’ concepts. In addressing the continuing forms of marginalization both on the ground and in social policy’s mainstream, I develop an analysis that is informed by contemporary thinking and activisms within and outside social policy and also connects to critical thinking in social policy that came out of social movements from the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, intersectionality emerged in the 1970s to make visible the struggles of women of colour whose experiences were reconstituted through the intersections race, gender, and class relations of power (Combahee River Collective [1977] 1995; Hull et al. 1982; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983; Lewis and Parmar 1983; Crenshaw 1989). This re-emerged in the twenty-first century both as a reassertion and a reflection of the power of black feminist thinking and as ‘the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far’ (McCall 2005: 1771). It serves as a methodological and political concept to reflect the multiplicity of identities and forms of domination and subordination as well as the need to recognize the connections that link theory and method to political practice (McCall 2005; Cho et al. 2013; May 2015; Hill Collins and Bilge 2016; Carastathis 2016; Hancock 2016; Romero 2018; Nash 2019).

That connection between the struggles of then and the possibilities of now has been likened to two bookends holding between them half a century of neoliberalism (Barnett 2020). At one end are the struggles for civil rights, solidarity with the Vietnamese against American imperialism, the Prague Spring, the 1968 student uprisings and the new social movements that followed. Within these were fundamental critiques of exclusions of those marginalized from the so-called universal progress of modernity since the Enlightenment in social, civil and human rights. At the other end, the global struggle for a new humanism is again asserting itself in different forms – the surfacing of a seam of activism that has continued in parallel to neoliberalism. Its impact was marked by the fact that, when Covid-19 struck, most governments felt obliged to prioritize, however incompetently and short-run, people’s lives and health over the financial interests of capitalism. This feeling of the value of human life, structured in people’s consciousness across the world, was given expression by the support for the Black Lives Matter protests in May 2020.

The ‘bookends’ metaphor is relevant to social policy. The development of a critical approach to social policy emerged from those sharpened understandings of welfare states in the 1970s and 1980s which provided feminist and anti-racist critiques of social policy and revised the class-centric perspectives of Marxist political economy. In particular, along with critiques based on disability, sexuality and age, they elaborated the social and organizational relations of power within welfare states and looked to participatory democratic and alternative ‘prefigurative’¹ ways of meeting people’s needs. The uptake in activisms in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis combined with the changing political context has shaped critical reflections on these earlier concepts. For example, the social concepts of ‘race’ and ‘Black’ once served to politicize and unify experiences of racialized oppression, yet, on their own, they do not convey the specificities of experiences of those constituted as minority ethnic groups (Modood [2007] 2013; Murji 2017) or the reconfigurations of diverse migrations (Vertovec 2007; Phillimore et al. 2021). Ethnicity, religion, nationality, language and migrant status (not to mention class, gender, sexuality, disability and generation) shape those experiences in different ways at different times. However, those categories are given shape and meaning through social policies and public (and popular) discourses. Such developments challenged the fixed binaries (male/female, Black/White, gay/straight, etc.) attached to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability and generation and introduced more fluid and dynamic interpretations of diverse subjectivities, identities and social positionings.

From the 1990s critical efforts were concentrated in reinstating the area of ‘the social’ into both welfare regime analysis and analyses of the cultural, ideational, organizational and material challenges to the Keynesian welfare settlement (Clarke and Newman 1997; Williams 1995; Lewis 2000; Lister 2003; Béland 2009). These developments influenced new thinking in social policy around both the agency of providers and users of welfare and their psychosocial dimensions and around welfare governance and its fluid and contingent reach to multiple publics (Clarke and Newman 1997; Williams et al. 1999; Lewis 2000; Hoggett 2001; Newman and Clarke 2009; Newman 2012a; Barnes and Prior 2009; Hunter 2015; Lister 2021). In addition, the issue of care has been transformed from being about family policy to a domain of intersecting and intersubjective power relations, a labour as well as a commodity, a relational ethics, and a dynamic central to the postcolonial transnational political economy, to democracy and to intersectional global justice (Sevenhuijsen 1998; Tronto 1993, 2013; Daly 2002; Robinson 1999; Williams 2001, 2018). Earlier anti-essentialist refusals to see ‘nature as destiny’ shifted to exploring the dynamics of power relations between human life, nature, technology and science in the ‘new materialisms’, in ecofeminism, and in ideas of the posthuman and critical disability studies (Coole and Frost 2010; Braidotti 2013; Goodley et al. 2014). These new forms of interdependence between the human, non-human and living world have created new challenges of developing eco-social policy analysis (Gough 2017; Jackson 2016) and new models for a wellbeing economy (Raworth 2017; Care Collective 2020) and for the possibility of a social commons (Ostrom 1990; Mestrum 2015; Newman and Clarke 2014; Coote 2017; Gough 2017). Prefigurative activism is now understood as part of the methodology of Utopian thinking (Levitas 2013; Cooper et al. 2020). Postcolonial critiques interrupt the dominant readings of globalization and of welfare regimes that ignore its history in a colonial world order whose logics of racial, gender, sexual and bodily subordination and dehumanization have been carried into contemporary geo-social politics (Mignolo 2011; Bhambra and Holmwood 2018; Shilliam 2018). Within social policy, Mbembe’s (2019) powerful concept of necropolitics, which refers to the state’s capacity to decide who is and who is not disposable, illuminates an understanding of the relationship between welfare policies and the situation of migrants, asylum seekers and BAME groups more generally (Mayblin et al. 2019).

Piecemeal and marginal to mainstream welfare theory as they may be, these new developments have influenced critical thinking in social policy. I have suggested elsewhere (Williams 2016) that these constitute ‘five turns’,² to: (i) agency, understood in relational rather than individualist terms; (ii) political ethics of care, of ecology, and of decoloniality; (iii) the global, post-/decolonial and geo-political relations of welfare states; (iv) prefigurative politics; and (v) the (re)turn to intersectionality. What they have in common is their attention to the complexity and multiplicity of power and inequality and to the connections between cultural, social, economic and political marginalization. They are informed by local and transnational activism. They provide new lenses on an understanding of possibilities of humanness and society’s ethical obligations, and, in doing so, they point to possibilities for future social policy. What each of these ‘turns’ means will become clear in the description of the book’s structure that follows.